A package management system is a collection of tools that automate the process of installing, configuring, upgrading, and/or removing software packages from a computing system. Software products may include many distinct software packages. Software packages are distributions of software, as well as the metadata associated with the software package, such as the name, description, version number, vendor, checksum, and a list of dependencies necessary for the software to run properly. The software may be bundled and packaged in specific package formats, such as RPM, deb, slp, tgz, or the like. Typical functions of a package management system may include verifying file checksums to ensure complete software packages, verifying digital signatures, managing encapsulated files, upgrading software with the latest versions from a software repository, grouping software packages, and managing dependencies of the software packages.
Conventional package management systems, however, do not provide a centralized tool that oversees, collects, and stores important information about individual software packages (e.g., source RPM packages). These conventional systems do not track metadata for each software package and the distributions that these software packages are shipped in. For example, these conventional systems do not track cryptographic routines, libraries, and other package metadata that are implemented in the software packages. Since this information is not tracked, a person, called a maintainer, has to manually inspect the software packages to determine whether the software packages comply with product release requirements. For example, the maintainer may have to review the comments associated with the source files to determine what cryptographic functions and libraries are used by the software packages, what licenses apply to the software package, what restrictions apply, etc. Similar, because this information is not tracked, the maintainer has to manually determine if the software packages have any changes, such as changes to cryptographic routines and libraries used by the software packages, when the source code is changed. This makes certification efforts more difficult and time consuming because this information must be retrieved and verified manually. This is extremely difficult for software products that have hundreds to thousands of different software packages. In addition, not only is this manual certification process prone to human error, the manual certification process can become burdensome, since each software package may have to be manually recertified for each software product release.